The Backbone of the World

By Editor

Blackfeet Country, Montana, 1880-1910

The Blackfeet called the Rocky Mountain Front the Backbone of the World. They had lived along it for thousands of years, moving with the seasons between the mountains and the plains, following the buffalo herds that made everything possible. When the buffalo were gone, the Backbone of the World was still there. The railroad saw it differently.

The Northern Pacific Railroad was completed across Montana in 1883. That same year, the last significant buffalo herds in Blackfeet country were exterminated. The two events were not unrelated. The railroad had brought hunters in numbers that the plains could not absorb, and it had carried the hides east in quantities that the market could not satisfy. By the winter of 1883 to 1884, the Piegan band of the Blackfeet Confederacy, who had lived on the northern Montana plains since before any American could remember, found themselves without the food source that had sustained them for generations. The government rations that were supposed to replace the buffalo did not arrive in sufficient quantities. That winter, nearly 600 Piegans died of starvation, a quarter of the tribe.

The Americans called it the Starvation Winter. The Blackfeet called it Starvation Winter too, because that is what it was.

James J. Hill completed the Great Northern Railway across northern Montana in 1893. His line ran along the Hi-Line, through the country north of the Missouri River, along the southern edge of what remained of Blackfeet territory. Hill was a practical man who understood that a railroad needed freight and passengers, and he understood that the mountains to the west of the Blackfeet reservation were among the most spectacular in North America. In 1895, the federal government negotiated an agreement with the Blackfeet Nation to purchase the western portion of their reservation, the mountain section, for $1.5 million. The Blackfeet, weakened by starvation and dependent on government rations, signed. The land they sold became part of Glacier National Park in 1910.

The Great Northern promoted Glacier National Park aggressively. The railroad built the hotels, brought in the tourists, and used images of Blackfeet people in its promotional materials. The Blackfeet men and women who appeared in the railroad's advertisements and on its calendars were photographed in traditional dress, performing ceremonies and standing before the mountains that had been their homeland. The railroad sold the image of the Blackfeet to tourists who arrived on trains that ran through the land the Blackfeet had sold to pay for food.

The 1888 agreement negotiated by Hill's agents with the Blackfeet had already opened northern Montana Territory to white settlement, reducing the reservation from its original boundaries. The 1895 agreement took the mountains. What remained was the eastern portion of the original territory, the plains country between Cut Bank Creek and the Canadian border, 1.76 million acres where the wind came off the Backbone of the World and the winters were long.

The Blackfeet did not disappear. They remained on the reservation, and they continued to regard the mountains to the west as their own in ways that no treaty could extinguish. The Badger-Two Medicine area, the sacred country at the southern end of the former reservation, remained a place of ceremony and significance. When oil companies sought drilling rights there in the 1980s, the Blackfeet fought them in court for decades and eventually prevailed.

The Great Northern Railway is gone now, absorbed into the Burlington Northern in 1970. The hotels it built in Glacier National Park still stand. The mountains are still there, as they have always been. The Blackfeet call them the Backbone of the World, which is what they are.

See also

• Blackfeet Nation, history and reservation
• Glacier National Park, creation and Blackfeet land history
• Starvation Winter of 1883-84, Montana Memory Project
• Agreement with the Blackfeet, 1895, the mountain land sale